Bin reminder goes rogue
Danny Katz is sick of being his neighbourhood’s ‘bin colour reminder twerp’. Will he put the wrong one out on purpose?
Never before in 22 years of writing have I felt compelled to write a sequel to a column, because my articles are selfcontained works of narrative completeness, requiring no further investigation or resolution.
Also no one’s ever shown any interest, so that may come into it, too.
But, not so long ago, I wrote an article about my obsessive wheeliebin diligence, and how I’ve become the neighbourhood ‘‘Bin-colour Reminder Twerp’’.
It’s the kind of brave topic I like to tackle, cutting to the heart of the global socio-politico-econimorubbisho zeitgeist.
In the article, I expressed the anguish of being used by my neighbours to lead the way with my weekly bin-colour configurations. And how I was seriously considering putting out the wrong-coloured bins, making everyone copy, then creeping out in the middle of the night to swap them around like a devious midnight Binja.
For some reason this article got a big reaction from the elite echelons of a laughy-face, a laughy-face-witha-bead-of-sweat, and the rare and coveted laughy-face-rolling-on-thefloor-with-tears-of-joy.
Others hated the piece, saying I was ‘‘unneighbourly’’ and ‘‘That was 20 minutes of my life I won’t get back!’’, which hurt at first, and then I thought, well, if it took them 20 minutes to read 538 words, maybe these are not the kind of readers I need to be getting too worried about.
And a fair whack of people asked for a follow-up. They wanted to know if I went through with my binswapping threat, and some of them even threw in a desperate handspleading emoji, so I knew this was a matter of life or death.
Against all my anti-sequel-writing instincts, I’ve decided to reveal what happened next.
Of course, I copped out. My bin diligence is so extreme, so ingrained, that when I tried to to drag the wrong coloured bin out of the driveway, I began to get shakes, palpitations and a crushing pain in the chest.
Possibly because I was trying to squeeze past the car and got wedged between the fence and the driver’s side mirror.
I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I didn’t. Instead, I got my son to do it.
I told him to start taking out the bins from now on – and he has no idea about bin colours or collection days or even that our local council has a waste-management system.
He just dragged out any old bin, at any old time, then dumped it in any old spot – didn’t even measure the mandatory 50-centimetre gap between bins using my patented Stretchedarm-length Method. Hard to believe we actually share DNA.
The tale ends tragically. Since then, my neighbours have given up on me, stopped trusting me, shunned me completely.
I am no longer the Bin-colour Reminder Twerp. I am forgotten. Unloved. A has-bin.